For those who haven't been there, A Book Barn is at 640 Clovis Avenue. They have everything. When you are done book shopping, Kuppa Joy, a great independent coffee shop is just a block up on the same side of the street.
Meanwhile, back on the farm- the first round of almonds are up and off to market. We'll shake the next varieties later this coming week. We are putting the last irrigations on the cotton. We are also working the wheat ground. We will bed it up soon. The farm didn't come with an instructional manual. A lot fo what we learned, we learned along the way
A Farm Doesn’t Come With an
Instruction Manual
By Paul H.
Betancourt
Copyright
July 2013
A farm doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Sure, there
are things you can learn from the family and from the neighbors. There are some
things you can learn from books at school. But, even gleaning all that
experience and knowledge you still have to apply it day by day, season, by
season and year by year. Research from the university can tell you at what soil
temperature you should plant cotton. But, they can’t tell you when that will be
or what to do if the weather turns cold after you go ahead and plant. The
manufacturers can give you a service schedule for a piece of equipment, but we
can usually find something they didn’t anticipate.
The simple definition of profit is
income over expenses, but no one can tell you which crops are going to be
profitable this year, much less a few years down the road. I have to make
decisions months or years before I know what conditions will be at harvest.
A lot of the lessons learned were
from the School of Hard Knocks. (Our team colors should be black and blue.)
There is no way to put them in an instruction manual, and if you did they would
probably get ignored anyways. I wouldn’t have believed some of these things if
someone told them to me when I started.
I hope you all have a great week!
P
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